Thursday, May 14th, 2015 Warped Portrait of the Artist Damien Hirst

Selling Art On Redbubble – A Review.

Currently I have the following artworks for sale on Redbubble:

The Damien Hirst Illustration Enhanced Vision – Digital Video

Saturday, May 9th, 2015 Image Still from the Digits digital video

I received an email the other day from ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community of which I am a member. The email alerted me to a new ACM SIGGRAPH (Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group-Graphics) project. Titled Enhanced Vision – Digital Video, it is billed as "an international survey of today’s most exciting and innovative digitally-enhanced video art works". The thirty videos included in this exhibition were curated by a committee of ten experts in the field.

The videos are supposed to tell a story – some worked, some didn’t. Be that as it may, my focus was on the imagery itself and the technical skills and imagination that went into their creation. On this level, a number of the videos did not my level of expectations.

While I watched all the videos, I have opted to comment only on certain ones. The list of videos and my comments follow.

If you are a maker of videos then you should give these a look. Each video comes with a brief description as well as a list of the software that was used in its creation. You may also want to contact a video’s creator(s) to learn more about how the created their work.

All the videos are accessible from the Enhanced Vision – Digital Video Collection

Happy Screening

Tags: ACM, Digital Video, Enhanced Vision, SIGGRAPH, video
Posted in Videos | Comments Off A Mobile Friendly Artsnova Blog

Monday, May 4th, 2015 Google Developer Says I’m Mobile Friendly

Last night I held my breath and swapped out my old blog theme files and CSS with the new responsive web design replacements I had just finished coding up. Why? Well, if you follow the news of the web then you are no doubt aware of the big change Google made last month (4/21 to be exact) to its search engine ranking algorithm. The heart of that change was to penalize web sites that are not mobile-friendly – or to put a positive spin on it – to reward web sites that are mobile friendly.

It was last September that I re-coded my main web site using the responsive web design paradigm to make my web site mobile friendly. You can read about that in my post Artsnova Digital Art Gallery – Mobile Friendly At Last. And in December when I launched my Jim Plaxco Photography web site, I did it as a mobile friendly web site from the start. It’s much easier to design a mobile friendly web site from scratch than it is to convert an existing web site!

Tackling my blog was another matter entirely, particularly since I had to first edit all of my previous blog entries to ready them for use with a responsive web design layout. That took time. Plus I had to insure that the responsive design theme I came up with for my blog provided the same look and feel as my separately managed web site. This extra challenge is a consequence of having created my web site first and only later adding a blog – for which I simply used a default theme at the time. With all the other items on my agenda, I really did not want to spend time making this design change but I viewed it as a necessity given Google’s actions. Note that mobile visits to my web site for the last month accounted for 16.9 percent of my traffic.

I’m happy to say that the implementation work is now done. I only have two more tasks. First I must revisit all my posts that contain embedded videos and determine how I will handle them as they use a fixed-width definition (just 425 pixels wide so not a big deal – I just need to create a CSS class for them). Second, I need to revisit every blog post using a combination of browsers and mobile devices to make sure that nothing broke in terms of the page layout. You could say that I’m doing my testing in a "live" environment. This is not considered good practice but given my time constraints, it is a better course of action for me to pursue.

If in the course of wandering around my blog you find something amiss, please contact me so that I can put things right. Thank you.
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